Three Weeks, Eight Seconds

by Tassell, Nige;

  Aside from tactical differences, cultural separation also dogged riders’ progress in the sport’s heartland. ‘The hardest thing for Colombian riders was being in Europe for a month,’ says Delgado. ‘They missed their family and their country. Back then, it was very typical for a Colombian rider like Lucho Herrera to want to go home after the first stage. Fabio Parra, though, understood that he needed to live outside Colombia for a month or two to be a professional cyclist.’ Not that, of course, such an approach did Parra too many favours in 1989, joining the rest of his team in abandoning the race several days before the race reached the Alps.

  Raúl Alcalá, the highest-placed Latin American rider in ’89, agrees that distance from home was a major factor for the Café de Colombia team. ‘It costs a lot to bring the team over for a few races, so it was best for them to keep the whole team together for as long as possible in Europe. Sometimes, the Colombians were tired from racing all the time in Europe. They preferred to go back and forth to Colombia. That was perfect for them. They got homesick all the time. They called home to Mama, to Papa to say they’re OK.’

  Herrera was the best-placed Colombian in the ’89 Tour, but his 19th place was undeniably a disappointment, more than 36 minutes down on the yellow jersey in Paris. In fact, he finished just one GC position and one minute ahead of his team-mate, Alberto Camargo, the young, largely undistinguished domestique. Furthermore, Camargo’s eighth place into Villard-de-Lans on Stage 18 was higher than any of Herrera’s finishes in the entire three weeks.

  Colombia’s most decorated cyclists would each only finish the Tour on one more occasion; Herrera came home 31st in 1991, while Parra finished 13th the previous year, before racking up two further abandonments. But the biggest pin deflating the country’s cycling bubble wasn’t the form of its top riders. On 3 July 1989, just as the Tour was belting around the Spa-Francorchamps Grand Prix circuit, the International Coffee Pact collapsed. Under the agreement, the coffee industry, a fundamental pillar of the Colombian economy, enjoyed protected status for its prices. With this safeguard suddenly removed, the price of coffee dramatically fell by 60% within 24 hours. The first casualty for the National Association of Coffee Growers of Colombia was obvious; the sponsorship of a professional cycling team was now no longer an imaginative marketing tool but an unsustainable luxury. Accordingly, 1989 would be the last time the Café de Colombia team would light up the Tour de France.

  In the years that followed, European teams would employ Colombian riders more and more as domestiques. Some might say that the move away from starring roles for the country’s cycling talent was already in place. After all, the Colombians who had most impact in the ’89 Tour were Delgado’s two loyal lieutenants, William Palacio and Abelardo Rondón, who nursed their leader from the lanterne rouge to the podium. Until the arrival of their compatriot Santiago Botero, who won the King of the Mountains jersey in 2000, Colombian eyes drifted away from the Tour de France, and cycling in general, attracted by national sporting success elsewhere, most conspicuously, in football and Formula 1.

  As Colombian attention declined, interest in the Tour from the US was at an all-time high. While a handful of American newspapers already sent a correspondent every year to report on the whole race – and ABC gave it airtime with highlights packages – editors across the nation didn’t want to miss out on what LeMond, Fignon and the rest were serving up. Not only was this epic sporting contest offering more twists and turns than the maziest Alpine pass, but LeMond’s back story offered the classic overcoming-the-odds tale that proved irresistible to non-sports fans too. Accordingly, the American presence in the press ranks substantially swelled in that final week, many journalists taking crash courses in this alien, exotic sport.

  And LeMond was intent on making sure the drama wouldn’t end until the last pedal stroke of the entire three weeks. He was fired the same question over and over. Did Fignon have too much advantage going into the last two days? ‘No, no no! Fifty seconds is a very good advantage but, I tell you, he’s going to have some sleepless nights.

  ‘He won’t beat me by 50 seconds.’

  Stage 19

  1. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) 3:17:53

  2. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) same time

  3. Pedro Delgado (Reynolds/Spain) same time

  4. Gert-Jan Theunisse (PDM/Netherlands) same time

  5. Marino Lejarreta (Paternina/Spain) +4”

  General classification

  1. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) 83:44:32

  2. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) +50”

  3. Pedro Delgado (Reynolds/Spain) +2’28”

  4. Gert-Jan Theunisse (PDM/Netherlands) +5’36”

  5. Marino Lejarreta (Paternina/Spain) +8’35”

  ***

  22 July

  Stage 20, Aix-les-Bains – L’Isle d’Abeau, 79 miles

  ‘This was a vacation. A long-awaited vacation.’

  You couldn’t blame LeMond – or anyone else in the peloton, for that matter – for taking their foot off the gas. Up until now, it had been one of the most extraordinary Tours ever, full of daring and drama, intrigue and incident. There hadn’t been so much as a single stage that could be described as mediocre. But it was perfectly acceptable if this, the race’s penultimate stage, fell into that category. Everyone needed to take a breath before Paris, after all.

  The tenor of the day was set early on when Fignon temporarily exchanged the maillot jaune for Teun van Vliet’s Panasonic jersey. And his playful mood continued, launching a semi-serious attack on this benign peloton, a wholly unnecessary move for the leader of the pack, unless he thought that he could pick up a few more seconds to plump up that 50-second time cushion.

  Deprived of the usual final-day mass sprint on the Champs-Élysées, the finish into L’Isle d’Abeau represented Sean Kelly’s last hope of a stage win in the ’89 race. Phil Anderson clearly fancied tasting victory, too. After one such win in the Giro the previous month, the Australian TVM leader wanted to repeat the feat and was anxious – once the attacks starting coming thick and fast on this otherwise most passive of stages – to be part of each and every breakaway. In the end, he went himself, timing his solo break just as the peloton were closing on Histor’s Wilfried Peeters, an earlier escapee.

  Anderson was soon swallowed up by the peloton as the teams of the big sprinters prepared to lead out their speedsters for a rare mass sprint – only the third of the entire three weeks. It appeared that Jelle Nijdam, in search of a hat-trick of victories, had the stage nailed when he struck for home 300 yards out. But he had possibly attacked a little too soon and hadn’t legislated for a pair of fast-arriving sprinters in good form. While Nijdam successfully held off the challenge of Kelly, who had to be content with third, the Dutchman was pipped to the line, by the thinnest of margins, by the Italian Giovanni Fidanza. After five top-ten finishes in the race (including second behind Mathieu Hermans in Blagnac, following Rudy Dhaenens’ late crash), the win was certainly deserved for the rookie Chateau d’Ax man.

  But that wasn’t it for the day. The riders then crossed to nearby Lyon to board a specially chartered, high-speed TGV train that would take them up to Paris, ahead of the following day’s time trial. It would prove to be a rather interesting journey.

  ‘The train ride before the final stage is my favourite part of the Tour,’ laughs Andy Hampsten. ‘The maximal kick in the sac for every bike rider was getting on the TGV and being served meat patties that were burnt on the outside and frozen on the inside, and rice that was cooked three months ago. But we knew this. We were smart. We had our own cook and he made us a beautiful pasta salad and chicken breasts. We were having a big picnic. Greg, with his inability to sit down – and with hardly any team-mates left to talk to by this point – was roaming up and down the train. “Hey Greg! Come and sit down.” I wasn’t a threat to him on GC and we were all friends, so we sat him down and fed him.

  “Greg, we think you can win this race.”

  “Oh no. I know I can win
this race.”

  ‘The main riders were in the first carriage,’ explains Delgado, ‘including LeMond, Fignon and me. Cyrille Guimard was there too. He was opening champagne bottles and toasting me – “Thanks for being such a very good adversary.” I said, “OK, but the Tour de France is not finished yet. Tomorrow is 25 kilometres. Maybe LeMond can recover some time. Maybe, 40 seconds. And maybe you’ll have a puncture or something like that.”’

  Delgado shakes his head with disbelief – disbelief he’s been holding for the last three decades. ‘I didn’t understand it. Incredible. Just stay focused for one more day.’ He sighs. ‘That champagne would end up tasting bitter.’ If Delgado had been the one with the 50-second lead, would he have been confident of defending it in the time trial? ‘Oh no, no, no. No champagne. There might have been 50 seconds, but the race isn’t over until the finish line.’ This was a dictum that Guimard instilled in LeMond back in the Renault days of the early ’80s. Perhaps he should have heeded his own advice.

  Hampsten tells a similar story about the presumptuousness of the yellow jersey on the transfer up to Paris. ‘On the train, Fignon came to LeMond, in front of some journalists, and congratulated him on his second place. It was all this “after that terrible injury”, “it’s been an honour battling you”, “we’re going back to my hometown and I’m going to be triumphant in Paris”. As they’re shaking hands with photographers and journalists all around, Greg looks him in the eye. He knew his playbook. He got it. But it wasn’t that Larry was trying to do some double or triple psychology. He really thought he was going to hold that 50-second lead. But Greg realised he had completely let his guard down. He was thinking “I’m just going to do a time trial. That gun’s going to go and I’m going to go so fast.”’

  Journalist François Thomazeau sees it differently, believing that the race leader was far from cocksure. ‘Not only was Fignon not overconfident, he was full of doubts. I’m sure he started the race with so much fear of losing that he did lose. And he was really injured. You could tell the pressure and doubts on the evening before when the riders took the train back to Paris. I was on that TGV and Guimard was refusing access to the Super U compartment. He was in an extremely bad mood and smelling of whisky, which was never a good sign. You could feel the tension.

  As I couldn’t work, I found myself sitting next to Greg. He had been left on his own; not a single journalist on the train was interested in talking to him. While Fignon’s camp was unavailable, LeMond was in great spirits, so thrilled and happy to have made it back to the Tour de France and finishing second. That was the great irony. You had a guy who thought he had lost the Tour and was cheerful as can be, while the guy who was about to win it was tense and refusing to talk! Greg told me his whole story in great detail and you know what? I was so convinced Fignon would win the Tour that I didn’t take notes or record our chat. My worst professional mistake…’

  By the time the train arrived at Gare de Lyon in Paris, Fignon was in a black temper. The hordes of photographers and cameramen waiting on the station platform weren’t conducive to an improvement in his demeanour. ‘We had hardly begun to move along the platform before someone bunged the usual camera under my nose and began throwing aggressive questions at me,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘Worn out by the stressful ambience, I spat at a camera crew who were in the way. Just my luck: they were from a Spanish channel against whom I had no grievance at all. Afterwards, as soon as any news story about my arrival at the station was run, the images were played again and again. It wasn’t the best publicity.’

  A separate report suggests that the Frenchman issued one cameraman with a not-so-polite invitation: ‘You want a punch in the mouth?’ Fignon himself admitted he gave the man from Channel 5 a shove. ‘I didn’t even think about what I was doing.’

  Less than 24 hours later, though, a surprise right hook was coming Fignon’s way. A metaphorical punch, sure, but one that packed enough power to hurt forever.

  Stage 20

  1. Giovanni Fidanza (Chateau d’Ax/Italy) 3:26:16

  2. Jelle Nijdam (Superconfex/Netherlands) same time

  3. Sean Kelly (PDM/Ireland) same time

  4. Mathieu Hermans (Paternina/Netherlands) same time

  5. Carlo Bomans (Domex/Belgium) same time

  General classification

  1. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) 87:10:48

  2. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) +50”

  3. Pedro Delgado (Reynolds/Spain) +2’28”

  4. Gert-Jan Theunisse (PDM/Netherlands) +5’30”

  5. Marino Lejarreta (Paternina/Spain) 8’35”

  ACT IV

  EIGHT SECONDS

  SIXTEEN

  CAPITAL GAINS

  ‘Some Spanish journalists thought that I went slowly so that I wouldn’t be the first rider to ride the race quicker than the winner’ – Pedro Delgado

  23 July

  Stage 21, individual time trial, Versailles – Paris, 15 miles

  AS THE MAN who held the record for the fastest individual performance in the 86-year history of the Tour de France, Sean Yates would have gazed along the route from the Palace of Versailles to the Champs-Élysées and fancied his chances. Slightly downhill and with a discernible tailwind in the air, the hope of glory in the final stage of this epic race was an irresistible prospect. If he were successful, it would represent the very pinnacle of his career, a moment unlikely to ever be equalled.

  That Sunday afternoon represented 7-Eleven’s last tilt at some success at the end of a disappointing, misfiring Tour. ‘We hadn’t won a stage and Andy Hampsten had slipped out of contention bigtime. So what was left? It got to the last stage and no one had won anything. Jim Ochowicz said, “I’ll give you $20,000 if you win the last time trial.” Maybe he thought the money would make the difference between winning and not winning. I told him I’d try as hard as I could, whether I was getting $20,000 or not, because that’s what I did. I never rode for money. I liked the way I lived and I liked to ride my bike. It wasn’t that I was saving up for my third Ferrari or anything. Twenty thousand dollars wasn’t suddenly going to make me go 2kph faster.’

  Despite 7-Eleven’s trademark relaxed environment, Ochowicz’s wager indicated a man under pressure. 7-Eleven as a company was in serious financial trouble and potential new sponsors needed to be approached. A stage win would certainly help these discussions after the disappointment of Hampsten’s Tour. Success in the Giro was one thing (Hampsten won in ’88 and was third in ’89), but American sponsors wanted success in France, in the sport’s blue riband event. The one being broadcast to the nation on ABC.

  Andy was a good athlete,’ says Yates, ‘but he was never a guy – or certainly didn’t portray himself as a guy – who said, “I’m going to fucking win this thing. I will deliver. Boys, you’ve got to be fucking on it.” You’re either like that or you’re not. And that just wasn’t his character.’

  Although he rode satisfactorily in some of the Alpine stages, Hampsten wasn’t ever a contender for a stage win. ‘I saw all the battles going on. There were eight or ten of us around LeMond and Fignon, but it was largely the two of them fighting it out. It was ping, bam, boom.’ And it would be the other American who made the headlines back home. ‘I spent my career trying to win the Tour de France and the dirty secret is that it never happened!’

  Nonetheless, Hampsten was looking forward to that afternoon’s innovative final stage. ‘It’s fine being sucked along on a free ride down the Champs-Elysées,’ he told Samuel Abt, ‘but arriving alone and not having to share the cheers is a wonderful reward for everybody.’ He came in 28th on the day and 22nd overall. Team-mate Yates fared better, finishing fifth, mirroring his position on the Rennes time trial. But he never got his hands on those ‘20,000 pieces of inspiration’.

  The other British rider, Glasgow’s Robert Millar, enjoyed a bittersweet Tour. His brilliant ride to Superbagnères, leading the way over all the day’s big climbs, was arguably the most impressive Tour victory of his ca
reer and, although he slipped a position on the GC on the time trial into Paris, his tenth position was his second-highest overall finish. But in the Alps he couldn’t stay in touch with Gert-Jan Theunisse in the pursuit of his other ambition, the polka-dot jersey. He finished third in that competition, the pair separated by Pedro Delgado.

  Theunisse’s jersey was one of four that the PDM team brought away from the race. Sean Kelly was in possession of two of them – the green points jersey and the red catch sprints jersey – while the previous year’s King of the Mountains, Steven Rooks, had to be content with winning the combined competition, rewarding the rider showing the most consistency across all the other categories. PDM’s haul was bountiful; four jerseys, four stage wins and four riders in the top ten overall, plus they held off Delgado’s Reynolds squad to take the team competition too.

  ‘The management were happy with the riders and the results,’ says Kelly, ‘but they were looking at LeMond who had just been with them. “What did we do here? Did we get it wrong? Should we have held on to him?” They didn’t say it directly, but that was something they were thinking about. I could read it. And it’s normal that the general manager and the directeur sportif would think in that way.’ The team’s PR man, Harry Jansen, was more transparent and direct. Speaking of the multiple jerseys their riders had bagged, Jansen admitted ‘we would give them all up for the yellow jersey’.

  The Dutch press, though, weren’t too impressed with the haul. Four riders in the top ten, yet none in podium places, let alone winning the race. ‘They thought Theunisse could have been higher, but the tactic was never for the rest of us to support one guy. We all rode our own race.’

  Kelly, whose 47th position on the final time trial meant he swapped places with Millar in the GC, had enjoyed one of his best Tours. A stage win remained elusive, and there was no early capture of the yellow jersey that he’d hoped for, but his extremely impressive climbing ensured that the winning of his fourth green jersey was little more than a formality. And it all came well into his thirties.